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This site is the central component of the artist Gretchen Andrew’s Search Engine Art piece titled “What is Ubuntu” that she will share in Cape Town in July of 2018 at Wikipedia’s annual conference. This sites anchors Gretchen’s Ubuntu paintings and allows them to spread on the internet in a way that makes her Internet Imperialism successful. If you find this site kinda strange it may mean you are human and we prioritize our search engine and artificially intelligent readers. However, one good way to get machines to read this site is to get people to read this site. So you humans are not totally lost on us. Just sort of 2nd class citizens to machines. Get used to it?

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This Search Engine piece is part of Gretchen’s Internet Imperialism where she programs her paintings to manipulate search results and, in doing so, brings awareness to how authority is created, used and manipulated online.

This year Wikipedia’s annual conference Wikimania has selected the theme of “Bridging knowledge gaps, the ubuntu way forward.” Gretchen has been asked to share her Internet Imperialism & Search Engine Art because of its relevance to art as a knowledge form and humanizing the internet.

This year’s Wikimania will take place in Cape Town in July 2018. The annual conference celebrating all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation including Commons, where Gretchen’s work is most active. Other projects by the Wikimedia Foundation include:

During the three days of conferences there will be discussions, meetups, training, and workshops, new projects and approaches, and exchange of ideas. The theme of Wikimania 2018 is “Bridging knowledge gaps: the ubuntu way forward,” with the aim of focusing on what and who is still missing from our sum of all human knowledge, and building shared strategies to bridge these collective gaps.

All welcome!

Gretchen has created an original piece to supplement her participating in Wikimania. This piece “What is Ubuntu” is a search engine art piece that include original paintings, content, xml, sitemaps, metadata, websites, and live search results.

In this artwork Gretchen has manipulated the images.google.com search results by programming her paintings to appear in the top results for that search displacing the previous results that dealt entirely with the Ubuntu linux operating system.

Prior to conducting Internet Imperialism on What is Ubuntu the search results had more to do with the technical than the human including Ubuntu, versions, Linux, releases, proxy questions, confusion about operating systems, open-source status, the ability to download, Ubuntu vs windows comparison and unity, another word who’s humanity is diminished online.